SERIOUSLY – CHECK THIS OUT!
UNIVERSITY FILM SERIES
Tuesday nights
Ayres 106 (The Little Theatre)
7:30pm
$3 donation appreciated
March 6, 2007
The Kids Are Alright: New Future Visions Portland filmmaker and curator Gretchen Hogue’s third annual show for the University Film Series. Hogue hosts and writes, “The New Future Vision for hungry eyes. Electronic paintings for cerebral spaces. Virtual avatars in the neon forest. Saturday morning cartoons never felt so good. Come on, feel the noise.”
Preceded by Chico State art student Michael Giannattasio’s min-documentary about Jonathon Keats’ Apian Ballet, the conceptual art project Keats began last November on the University Farm (“dances for honeybees choreographed with flowers cultivated on the campus of California State University, Chico”).
CALIFORNIA HONEYBEES TO DANCE IN STATE-SPONSORED BALLET
Conceptual Artist Jonathon Keats To Choreograph First Performance Season In Collaboration With Chico State University Students and Faculty
November 20, 2006 – Skilled at dancing eons before humans could walk, honeybees are admired by entomologists for the complex physical language with which they communicate the location of flowers to one another. Yet the species has been ignored by choreographers from Nijinsky to Balanchine, who have preferred to work with their own kind. “Humans can be a bit narcissistic,” comments San Francisco conceptual artist Jonathon Keats. “Bees are nothing like us.”
In an effort to bridge the divide between Homo sapiens and Apis mellifera, Mr. Keats will choreograph the first ballet specifically for honeybees while at California State University, Chico, as a visiting artist during the week of November 27th. Working with students across disciplines, he will plant nearly one hundred narcissus bulbs on the Chico State University farm, carefully arranged to inspire apian ballet when they bloom in the Spring.
“Deep inside their hives, the bees will dance according to the locations of flowers they’ve found,” Mr. Keats explains. “The ballet won’t be predictable, though, because the bees will also encounter flowers that we haven’t planted. The choreography isn’t dictated, merely suggested.”
Moreover, performances inside the hives, ongoing throughout the Spring 2007 season, will not be open to human audiences. “The bees will dance for each other, not for us,” says Mr. Keats. And what will we experience? “The flowers, and the dances they evoke in our minds.”
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Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, novelist, and critic. For his most recent project, at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, he exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork. He has also attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish, in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, and petitioned Berkeley to pass a fundamental law of logic – A=A – a work commissioned by the city’s annual Arts Festival. He has been awarded Yaddo, MacDowell, Ucross, and MacNamara fellowships, and his projects have been documented by KQED-TV and the BBC World Service, as well as periodicals ranging from The San Francisco Chronicle to The Boston Globe to New Scientist. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. For more information, please contact Mr. Keats at jonathon_keats@yahoo.com, or see http://www.modernisminc.com/artists/Jonathon_KEATS/